


Room for One More Troubled Soul

by mimizans



Series: About to Walk [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Friendship, Gen, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-09
Updated: 2013-04-09
Packaged: 2017-12-07 23:12:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/754213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimizans/pseuds/mimizans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Before," Eponine murmurs, testing the word in her mouth. She turns to look at Grantaire, her gaze thoughtful. "What comes after?" she asks.</p>
<p>Grantaire's lips twist with mirth. "When I find out, I'll let you know," he assures her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Room for One More Troubled Soul

**Author's Note:**

> this is part one of a three-part universe! part 2 is grantaire's story, part 3 is eponine's, and they will be written simultaneously. i don't expect this verse to be terribly coherent; it's going in a DIRECTION and i have a destination, but it remains to be seen how long it will take to get there or what inane detours i will take along the way. come on a journey w/ me friends~~
> 
> thank you to [melissa](http://redfishtwofish23.tumblr.com) for the beta!

The pavement grates against Grantaire’s cheek as he blinks open his eyes. He immediately regrets the decision. The flickering light from a nearby street lamp seems to burn as brightly as the noon sun, and he snaps his eyes shut with a sharp inhale. His vision flashes white, and it’s only when he tries to rub at his eyes that he realizes his hands are stuck to his t-shirt. He tugs them free, and they leave vivid red prints behind.

Grantaire rolls onto his back, groaning when his muscles momentarily spasm. This certainly isn’t the first time he’s passed out on the sidewalk, not by a longshot, but the pain of sleeping on the unforgiving ground still shocks him every time. He stretches his neck out, tipping it back far enough to see the wall behind his head. There’s a small can of paint sitting on the sidewalk, tacky rivulets drying down its sides, and a worn brush abandoned on the ground beside it. A sharp line of color stains the wall, and Grantaire narrows his eyes, trying to get them to focus. The stain is a word, he realizes, violently red against the whitewashed brick. The letters are neatly rigid, clear and confrontational: “BEFORE.”

He has no idea why he chose that particular word, of course. He’d been drunk and melancholy, and thinking, as always, of things (people - a person) that he shouldn’t. He can’t remember picking up the paint, but he can remember leaving his apartment, stumbling down the back stairs and only just managing to avoid breaking his neck; he can’t recall painting the brick wall, but he can remember standing on the sidewalk, staring at BEFORE with his arms hanging limply at his sides. Grantaire smiles at the image: a wayward drunk, his eyes glazed, watching paint dry. A laugh slips past his lips and disappears before it hits the air.

He holds his hands up in front of his face and squints at them, admiring the way the paint has settled into every line and crevice on his palm, clinging to him like a second skin. He had stood in front of the wall and pressed his hands to the still-wet paint, had dragged his fingers through the word, smudging the e’s. He’d almost felt guilty, but then he had scratched his fingernails hard against the brick and pushed the guilt away. _I fuck up all the things I touch_ , he’d thought viciously. _Why should this be any different?_ He’d sunk down to the sidewalk, his brain spinning and buzzing and trying its best to push its way out of his skull, and he’d fallen asleep almost before his head hit the ground. He’s not sure what time he closed his eyes, and he’s even less sure of what time it is now. The sun hasn’t yet begun to show itself, though, and Grantaire is grateful for that small mercy. Loneliness and hangovers, in his experience, are best endured in the dark.

He hears the barest hint of sound, then, through the dull pounding in his head. It’s the scraping of gravel and the rustle of clothing, and he turns his head to the source of the noise. There’s a young woman sitting on the curb a few feet from him, her arms looped around her knees and a cigarette tucked behind her ear. Her hair has gone flat, tumbling down her back in a tired slump, and her lips are the dull, smeared red of a long night out. Grantaire imagines that there are cloudy glasses in a bar somewhere with her mouth printed on them.

“Oh, hello,” he says, struggling to sit up. He’s still drunk, and the abrupt movement makes his head swim. “I didn’t see you there! Not that I was seeing much, what with the whole ‘passed out on the sidewalk thing.’” He’s sure he looks horrible, all glassy eyes and clammy skin, covered in paint stains and with a face pockmarked by the sidewalk, and he wishes, not for the first time, that he wasn’t such a mess. The young woman glances at him and smiles, though, and Grantaire appreciates the gesture.

She jerks her head towards the wall. “Before?” Her voice is surprisingly deep, raspy with the smoke of too many cigarettes.

Grantaire isn’t sure of the question (but when is he, really?), so he smiles back at her and shrugs.

She turns her gaze away from Grantaire, looking intently at the blinking neon sign of the bar across the street. The green light catches in her dark hair, making it look as though she’s spangled with emeralds, and her brown face is steeped in Noir shadows. She looks very far away, very sad, and very proud, and Grantaire decides that he likes her. “Before,” she murmurs, testing the word in her mouth. She turns to look at him, her gaze thoughtful. “What comes _after_?” she asks.

Grantaire’s lips twist with mirth. “When I find out, I’ll let you know,” he assures her, drumming his fingers on the curb.

“Fair enough,” she says cheerfully, plucking the cigarette from behind her ear and fishing a lighter out of her left boot. “Why that word?” Her cigarette bursts to life, and she blows a long curl of smoke out through her nose.

“I have no idea,” he laughs. “What can I say? I’m a man of infinite mysteries, and sometimes I’m so mysterious that even I have no idea what motivates my bizarrely destructive, vaguely criminal behavior. I like to think it’s part of my charm.” He scratches at his jaw absently. “Oh, I’m Grantaire, by the way.”

“Eponine,” she replies, holding out her free hand for him to shake, heedless of the paint on his fingers. He has to move to reach her, and when she’s taken her hand back he stays close, his hip scant inches from hers. Eponine silently offers him her cigarette.

Grantaire loves the imprint that her lipstick has left on the filter, but he shakes his head. “That’s one vice I never did pick up.”

Vines of smoke curl up into the night, and Eponine’s answering smile is fox-like. “What are your vices, then?” she asks, taking another long draw on her cigarette.

“Oh, you know, alcohol, artistic stagnation, crippling self-doubt,” Grantaire says with a shrug. “Take your pick.”

“You’re an artist?” Eponine asks, her deep voice rising with the question.

Grantaire laughs, the sound short and derisive. “So-called.” He’s quiet for a moment, watching her smoke dance through the pool of light cast by the nearby street lamp.

“So, Eponine!” he says brightly, seeming to come back to himself. He rubs his hands together briskly, like he’s trying to warm them. “At the risk of sounding creepy - and you can totally not answer this, I know I’m just some weird drunk guy you met on a deserted street in the middle of the night, and I’m incredibly grateful, by the way, that you didn’t call the cops on me, because I’m not saying I have priors, but I have priors - can I ask what you’re doing out here so late? I mean, I’m usually shit-faced and I enjoy defacing private property, so obviously I would be passed out on a sidewalk after midnight. But you seem relatively normal, you’re not noticeably drunk, and you don’t seem to be a serial killer or a shady, back-alley drug dealer. What’s your excuse?”

Eponine sighs and stubs her cigarette out on the ground, but she can’t stop a smile from slipping onto her face, whether at his rambling or her memories Grantaire isn’t sure. She nervously tucks her shaggy hair behind her ears. “I met someone,” she says finally.

“Damn, I was kind of hoping you were a drug dealer,” Grantaire says, snapping his fingers.

Eponine laughs and licks at the corners of her mouth. “I don’t want to go home yet,” she says, just a little breathless, “because if I do, the night will be over.” She wraps her arms around her knees and chews at her lip, biting hard enough to break the skin. “And when I wake up in the morning,” she says softly, “it won’t be the day that I met her anymore.”

“What’s she like?” Grantaire asks, because he knows this feeling. He presses his foot into the toe of his shoe until it hurts.

Eponine is quiet for a moment, pondering the question. “Like an angel. Like starlight,” she says finally, and the words are dreamy and love-stained. Grantaire can’t help but smile, because it sounds like something he would say; not the words - because the man he thinks of shines too brightly to be anything but the sun, near and hot and incandescent - but the sentiment, born of that pure, worshipful abandon that he feels sometimes, on days when the sun shines on him.

Eponine runs her finger roughly along the outside seam of her jeans. “I’ll probably never see her again,” she says with a shrug. “I didn’t even get her number. I just - I feel like I could’ve talked to her forever and never have gotten tired of watching the way her mouth moved. She’s... special, you know?”

Grantaire falls backwards onto the sidewalk and laces his fingers behind his head. “I do know,” he replies, feeling the concrete bite at his knuckles.

Eponine looks down at him with her fox smile. “Do you have an angel too?” she asks, a teasing lilt to her voice.

Grantaire shakes his head and traces Orion’s belt with his eyes. “No, I don’t have him,” he says with a rough sound that might be a laugh. “And he refuses to have me.”

“That’s sad,” Eponine says simply, and doesn’t tell him that she’s sorry.

“Isn’t it?” he agrees, smiling at her. “It’s not his fault, though. I’m a trainwreck, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed. A pimple on the ass of society. A fourth-grader who still eats his own snot. I am a level of trainwreck heretofore unseen on this Earth. I’m a Super Saiyan trainwreck.”

“Wow,” Eponine says, her cigarette hanging limply from her fingers. “That’s impressive.”

“In the worst way,“ Grantaire says with a sigh. “I can’t blame him for hating me because, well, fuck, even I hate me.”

“I like you,” Eponine points out, squinting at him. “That’s got to count for something.”

“No offense,” Grantaire says, propping himself up on his elbow, “but you’ve known me for ten minutes. And I’ve never puked on you. So.”

“I’d probably still like you if you puked on me,” Eponine says with a toss of her hair. “I’m pretty easygoing about stuff like that. Gross stuff. You’ll just have to promise to still like _me_ after I puke on _you_.” She purses her lips and raises her eyebrows, daring him to contradict her.

He doesn’t. “I’ll make that promise,” Grantaire says instead, a laugh tripping out of his mouth. “You’re pretty great, you know that?”

“I do,” she says evenly, and she sounds so sure of herself that he wonders if she really does know.

\- - -

Eponine slurps happily at her coffee. She’s put so much cream and sugar in it that it’s almost white and only lukewarm, and Grantaire is looking at her with the narrow-eyed suspicion of a coffee-lover, but she doesn’t care. It’s her coffee, she’s paying for it, and if she wants to dilute it with artificial creamer and refined sugar until it’s almost undrinkable, then she will. It’s nice to be able to make choices like that, she thinks - to get to decide about the little things.

Grantaire sips at the dregs of his own coffee (he’s on his second cup, both black) and pushes his cherry pie towards Eponine. He’d barely taken a bite before he’d started to look green, his uneasy hangover stomach roiling at the thought of food. Eponine was quick to tell him that while she would still be his friend if he puked on the formica table-top, she would _not_ help him clean it up, nor would she protect him from the wrath of their steely-eyed waitress. Grantaire had swallowed thickly and told her that he would try his best not to vomit if she’d eat his pie for him.

“It’d be shitty of me to let it go to waste,” he said, his gaze conspicuously avoiding the offending slice of cherry pie. Eponine is more than happy to take the pie off his hands, and after she finishes her own slice she starts in on his. She’s not a dainty eater, and she shovels forkfuls of brightly-colored cherry filling into her mouth with impressive speed. Grantaire watches her with a delighted smile on his face.

“What?” she asks, noticing him staring. She loudly swallows the bite of food in her mouth.

“I’m just impressed with your skills,” he says, still grinning. “You’ve eaten a slice and a half of pie in, like, literally, 65 seconds, and I’m pretty sure that’s a world record. Have you considered a career as a professional eater?”

Eponine’s smile is thin. “It’s an acquired ability,” she says with a shrug of her slender shoulders. “My family ate out a lot when I was young...” She pauses, looking down at her nearly-devoured pie. “Well, I say, ‘ate out,’ but really my parents just skipped out on the bill. They did it enough that all the restaurants in our part of town knew about it before long, even if they didn’t know what we looked like. So I had to eat fast, you know,” she says with a laugh, “in case they figured out the scam and we had to run for it.”

“Oh, shit,” Grantaire says, the smile gone from his face. “Wow, that’s - I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to - ” Eponine cuts him off by jabbing his hand with her cherry-covered fork, and he yelps and jerks his arm away.

“Oh, don’t be a baby,” she says, scooping up another bite of pie. “And don’t apologize either. It’s not your fault, and I’m not ashamed of it. It was all I knew for a long time, and... Fuck.” She sighs deeply and takes her bite, the cherry filling gleaming at the corners of her lips. “Just don’t feel bad for me, okay?” she commands, brandishing her fork threateningly.

Grantaire nods and flicks a pack of sugar across the table at her, smiling when it lands in the red remains of her pie. “I’m not into that whole pity thing, anyway,” he says, perfectly nonchalant. “All it does is reinforce this fucked up sense of moral superiority, as if people should feel grateful that they’re being infantilized and talked down to in the name of mercy or charity or whatever it is assholes call it when they’re trying to assuage their consciences. This friendship is a no-pity-zone, cross my heart.”

Eponine smiles around a mouthful of her white coffee. “Our friendship hasn’t had a very auspicious start,” she says after she’s swallowed. “I mean, I promised to still like you if you puked on me and you promised not to feel bad for me because I grew up in a family of petty criminals. Those are some pretty low standards.”

“Empires have been founded on less,” Grantaire says, folding his hands neatly in front of him. “But if you want this to be a normal friendship - instead of one of convenience based on our mutually low standards for human companionship - I have an idea on how to make that happen. See, I’ve heard that a lot of ‘friends’ talk about their love lives. It seems to be a sort of strange social bonding ritual. Something about building emotional bridges? It’s pretty technical, kind of obscure - I’m not sure I understand it all that well myself."

Eponine laughs brightly, and Grantaire smiles back at her, wide enough to show all of his teeth. “So maybe we could do that?” Grantaire says. “I mean, I did hear you mention a girl earlier, and, as your totally normal and not at all pathetic friend, societal norms dictate that you share information about her with me.”

“Oh no,” Eponine says, her deep laugh turning into an awkward giggle. “I already overshared. Now it’s your turn.” She leans across the table. “I heard _you_ mention a boy.”

Grantaire flushes. “You don’t want to hear about him,” he says, waving a dismissive hand. “He’s difficult.”

“I love difficult,” Eponine says. “I live and breath difficult. Please, bond with me by telling me about your difficult boy.” She reaches out and places one of her hands over Grantaire’s. “Our new, completely normal friendship will be stronger because of it,” she says gravely.

“You’re gonna regret asking about this,” Grantaire warns her with a low laugh, pulling his hand away to run it through his hair. “I’m a mess, so, obviously, the thing with him is a mess, and he’s not a mess, but he is kind of an asshole, but I love him, but that just makes the whole thing messier.”

“Yeah, wow, that sounds... messy,” Eponine says, doing her best not to laugh at his distressed ineloquence.

“It is,” Grantaire says, nodding seriously. “It really is.”

“So, what’s up with this boy?” Eponine prompts. She runs her finger through the candy-bright remains on her plate and sucks the digit into her mouth, releasing it with a loud pop. “He must be pretty special.”

“Lemme put it like this.” Grantaire hunches forward, and the cracked vinyl of the booth screeches with the movement. He looks haggard under the fluorescent lights of the diner, Eponine thinks, but he also looks terribly alive, like the light might be coming from somewhere inside him. “I don’t care about much of anything, and I guess I never have. I don’t know, maybe I just read Nietzsche too young,” he says with a gritty chuckle, “but I’ve never felt that life was worth much. Everything is essentially meaningless, right, so what the fuck is the point of caring? What’s the point of anything at all? Breathing, eating, fucking, _living_ \- it’s all just stuff to do until you’re _not_ living anymore and they put you in the ground. The human race doesn’t have a greater purpose. I mean, fuck, we clearly weren’t put here by some benevolent guardian to love each other and hold hands and sing Kumbaya. All of us are fucked up, and we fuck up everything around us. All of us.” He sighs, and the sound seems to come from his bones. “All of us except for him.”

Grantaire runs a hand roughly over his face, rubbing at the stubble on his cheeks, and stares up at the overhead lights until the glare makes him close his eyes. “Enjolras,” he says, slowly, deliberately, “is the one perfect thing that makes me think this shitstain of a planet might be worth living on.”

“Oh,” Eponine breathes. A glob of cherry filling falls from her finger and splatters on the table. “Wow.”

“Wow,” Grantaire says in agreement, sitting back and crossing his arms tightly over his chest. “When I met him, the whole world came screeching to a halt, like I was in some fucking queer rewrite of a Nicholas Sparks novel. I remember meeting his eyes across the room at this crowded party - what a cliche, right - but it was like my whole life swung on its hinges. Dams broke, buildings fell, fireworks went off in every direction. What does the non-believer do when he’s forced to believe in something?” Grantaire asks, gesturing to his own sorry state with no small sense of irony.

Considering that when she met Grantaire he was drunk and lying facedown on the sidewalk, Eponine thinks she can hazard a guess. “He drinks,” she supplies promptly.

Grantaire lets out a harsh, startled laugh. “Thank you, Eponine,” he says, and playfully kicks her under the table. “Yes, he drinks. Well, he drinks even more than he had been drinking, which was a lot anyway. And this, of course, doesn’t endear him to the object of his affections, who - as is right and proper for the one pure beacon of truth and light on this toilet earth - is not a drinking man.”

Eponine swirls the cold remains of her coffee around in her mug. “You said earlier that he hates you,” she says. “Is that true?”

Grantaire shrugs. “I don’t know. He definitely doesn’t like me. I make him angry, I guess, because I don’t contribute, or I haven’t lived up to my potential, or -” He stops abruptly and runs a distracted hand through his hair. “I don’t know,” he says again, and his voice is terribly small. _He sounds lost_ , Eponine thinks sadly. She knows the feeling all too well.

“I don’t either,” she replies, because it’s true.

Grantaire lets out an exaggerated sigh, like he can clear the air between them with his breath if he tries hard enough. “Well, that was fucking depressing!” he exclaims, clapping his hands together. “Aren’t you glad you asked?”

“Yes, I am,” Eponine says. She doesn’t see the point in lying.

Grantaire’s smile is too wide. “Well, now that I’ve told you about my garbage pit of a love life, you have to tell me about yours,” he says. “Come on, I’m breathless with anticipation. I’m practically quivering.” He lays his hands on the table and makes a show of making them tremble like a junkie’s.

Eponine stands her elbows up on the table and rests her face in her hands. “There isn’t much to tell. I was at a bar, I met a girl, I liked her, she left.” Eponine pauses and thanks the waitress as she refills their coffee cups. “That’s all there is to it, really,” she says after the woman has walked away, and she digs a handful of creamer cups out of the bowl on the table.

“Unsatisfactory,” Grantaire says, sipping at his own refreshed coffee. “I practically cried, Eponine! You owe me details.”

“Like?” she prompts. She doesn’t look up at him; instead, she watches pale swirls of creamer billow on the surface of her coffee.

“Well, what was her name?” Grantaire asks. “What did she look like?”

Eponine tears open a packet of sugar. “Her name was Cosette,” she says. “She was blonde. She had the cutest nose, and really big green eyes, almost like a bush-baby,” she says with a laugh that she hides behind her hand. “She was wearing a green dress. And when she smiled, I mean... I swear to god, I almost fainted.”

“A fairy princess, then,” Grantaire says, grinning at her.

Eponine smiles down at the table. “She accidentally bumped into me, and she couldn’t stop apologizing,” she says, dumping another sugar into her coffee. “I kept trying to tell her that it was fine, you know, it was a total honor to have her spill her drink on me, but she was upset, so I let her buy me a drink.” Eponine stirs her coffee slowly, listening to the soft clink of the spoon against the sides of the mug. “We stood by the bar and she asked me about my classes and told me about the charity event she’s planning for her sorority. We didn’t talk about anything, really, but it was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had. It was like being in a dream... and I guess at the end of the night she went back to her beautiful fairy flower kingdom, never to be seen again,” Eponine says with a sad laugh.

“Well,” Grantaire says softly, his words muffled by the rim of his mug, “I sincerely hope you see her again.” He shrugs. “I mean, who knows, maybe the two of you are meant to be.”

Eponine snorts. “Do you really believe in that?” she asks, holding her mug tightly in her brown hands and fixing him with an accusing stare. “Soulmates and destiny?”

“Of course not,” Grantaire says with a rough laugh, leaning back in his seat. “But it’s nice to pretend, isn’t it?”

Eponine takes a long sip of her coffee, enjoying the way the sugar coats her tongue, and imagines meeting Cosette again, maybe in the daylight this time. Busy people would stream all around them, but Cosette would look only at her, a dazzling smile on her face and a spring breeze in her hair. “Yes,” Eponine says, smiling sweetly at Grantaire. “Yes, it is.”


End file.
